


M and A

by overcomewithlongingfora_girl



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-02-19 21:17:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13132413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overcomewithlongingfora_girl/pseuds/overcomewithlongingfora_girl





	1. Chapter 1

Here she is, and Ash kind of can’t believe it. She super can’t believe it. Meggie, all curly-haired and glorious and gorgeous, is sprawled out on Ash’s bed, grinning up at her. She’s almost naked – she’s wearing lingerie, and Ash never would’ve expected that from the sensible practical boring girl in her physics class but here she is, in bows and blue lace.  
She’s taking Ash’s breath away.  
For a moment, Ash just waits there, staring down at Meggie, trying to commit every inch of her to memory. Meggie is grinning up at Ash, but Ash can’t even smile back, she’s too wrapped up in all of the smooth perfect skin she sees, the mole high up on Meggie’s thigh, the way her body curves in and out like waves on the shore. She’s perfect. She’s so perfect. The chip in her top left canine is perfect. The birthmark on her collarbone is perfect. The little discolored spot in her eye, the reason for the glasses with the blue frames that sit on the bedside table – that’s perfect too.  
“Are you going to join me?” asks Meggie, lifting one dark eyebrow, and Ash grins down at her, head so full of things to say that she can’t speak. She nods instead.  
Ash flops down on the bed next to Meggie, brushing nonexistent hair out of the way before she remembers she buzzed it weeks ago. Without missing a beat, she’s reaching for Meggie. She’s insatiable, hands moving frantically, tangling in Meggie’ dark curls, running her palms over her impossibly smooth skin. She wants to be everywhere at once.  
“God, you’re beautiful,” she whispers, cupping Meggie’s cheek in one hand. When they kiss, it’s deep and slow and they move against each other languidly, Ash’s frenzy calming for a second as their bodies press together. It feels like heaven. It could go on forever but Ash breaks away, nipping down the column of Meg’s throat. “I love your freckles,” she murmurs, connecting the little brown dots with her fingers all across Meggie’s shoulders. The blush in Meggie’s cheeks extends to the tips of her ears, and down, down her throat. Ash chases it down Meg’s torso.  
“You’re so hot,” Ash moans as her hands move greedily over Meg’s bra. She works the straps down, pulls down the cups and sighs against perfect pale skin. Meggie shivers under her at Ash’s hot breath, and Ash loves that, sending a smirk Meggie’s way. She brings her mouth down to suck carefully at the skin there, seeing the red come up already under Meggie’s skin. The other girl moans and twists under her ministrations, twisting under Ash, hands coming up to grab at Ash’s head. With no hair to hold onto, her hands slip on Ash’s scalp, and a surprised laugh sneaks out of her. It fades into a low moan as Ash’s fingers trace up Meggie’s exposed spine to the back of her neck, her scattered hair. Ash catches her fingers in smooth locks and pulls Meggie’s head back just a little as she kisses her way down Meg’s chest.  
She takes her time, makes Meggie growl with frustration as she pauses to rake her fingers over Meggie’s belly, rub her thumbs into Meggie’s hipbones. She’s obsessed with the way Meggie’s hips open just a little, like slender parentheses. She can’t get over the way she can feel Meggie’s hipbones there, hard and present just under her skin.  
Eventually she has to leave Meggie’s middle behind and the other girl groans as Ash reaches her destination. Ash’s fingers slide along the band of Meggie’s underwear. Meggie makes a pleased sound in the back of her throat and Ash can hardly breathe.  
She’s lying between Meg’s legs and the other girl is up on her elbows looking down at Ash sprawled between her spread thighs. “This okay?” Ash asks, voice hoarse, and Meggie nods, this adorable smile lighting up her face. Her easy happiness relaxes Ash, some of the tenseness slipping out of her muscles. Grinning, Ash reaches under Meg and squeezes her ass, making Meg squeal and laugh and squirm to get away. “You’ve got a cute butt,” she tells Meggie, and both of them are still grinning like mad.  
Leaning forward again, she kisses Meggie’s hipbone, and then draws her panties down a little. She kisses the crease where the band of Meg’s underwear rested. She pulls them down farther and kisses Meggie’s inner thigh. She keeps going like that – down Meggie’s thigh, and the hollow of her knee, and even her instep. “Don’t be one of those foot fetish people,” teases Meggie softly, and Ash just laughs and kisses her way back up the other side.  
She’s never done this –all the kissing, and the gentle, and the asking if it’s okay – not that she’s, like, done anything wrong, but this is…this isn’t Ash. And she’s so nervous, she’s so, so nervous, and her heart is swollen and aching in her chest. She’s hopeful and anxious and every smile, laugh, moan from Meggie soothes her and also winds her up a little more.  
She’s between Meggie’s legs and she sits up again to check. “This okay?” she asks, a smile curving up the side of her face. The smile feels foreign, but right. She’s happy, she is, she’s really, deliriously happy to be here. It’s just that a part of her is sitting in another room, wondering, marveling, trying to understand how a standoffish girl from physics has undone Ash this way. Has taken Ash apart in this way.  
Meggie looks at her, heart shaped face framed by oak-brown ringlets, her brown eyes sparkling and shot through with gold. “Go down on me already,” she says softly, and Ash’s face cracks wide open with her grin.  
The best parts are the little noises Meggie makes. She isn’t shy, but she’s not loud either – Ash has to work for it. Variety, Ash learns early, is the way to go. Caught by surprise, Meggie makes the most delicious little noises – each hitch in her breath travels down her body, and Ash takes each one as a personal victory.  
Ash lets it build for a long time, draws Meggie out, not cruelly, not edging, just bringing her slowly to the edge, carefully, with mouth and skillful fingers and calculated pauses in just the right places. Ash employs every trick that has ever worked for or on her, and Meggie can’t help but respond. She gasps and groans and her fists clench and unclench around handfuls of sheets. She squirms and twitches and breathes heavily, her panting building to high crescendos of little helpless cries that Ash absolutely loves.  
When Meggie climaxes, she stiffens and shakes and then goes totally boneless with a muted cry that melts into a sigh, just as she melts into the pillows on the bed. Wiping her mouth on her t-shirt, Ash crawls up next to her and drapes herself over the curly-headed brunette. She wraps her arms around Meggie’s middle and tucks her nose into her neck. Meggie makes a contented little sound and presses against Ash, arms curving up to hold her back. The smile curving up Ash’s face is unstoppable. This is nice. This is really, really nice. She’s in bed with a pretty, happy girl, and they’re cuddling, and who knows what’s in the future for them?  
Twenty bucks in the future for you, a voice in the back of her head tells her. Something heavy and sick-making curls up in Ash’s stomach. Ash ignores it. It’s not hard to ignore. She just tells herself it doesn’t matter. That’s not something she needs to worry about anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

Ash knows Meggie doesn’t like her, but she doesn’t particularly care, because Meggie doesn’t like anyone. That’s something even Carter agrees on, and his favorite extracurricular is arguing. If that testimony wasn’t enough, Carter won’t argue with Meggie. The girl is downright impossible, even without the added distraction of her appearance. 

Yes, Meggie is gorgeous. Ash saw her the first day and practically drooled on her desk, but in the intervening weeks, Meggie has not only seemed straight, but also proved herself to be a stuck-up introvert. Nothing wrong with introverts, of course, but Meggie had her nose buried in a book half the time, and the other half, she was looking down her nose at everyone except Professor Larson. Of course she’d love Professor Larson. Wrinkled, white old Professor Larson, a man who had the distinction of being approximately a million years old, had a stick the size of a redwood up his butt, and absolutely hated Ash. 

Okay, Ash was late to class, and she talked a lot, and she laughed too loudly. But physics was boring! And Ash got good enough grades, anyway, so it wasn’t like prissy old Larson really had a reason to complain. That didn’t stop him from doing it. All he did was bitch about her talking, and keep her after class, and do his best to grade her down on everything that he possibly could. He once took points off a quiz because she wrote the wrong date on the top, and apparently not paying attention to the passage of time was a punishable offense.

Ash had taken some small, vindictive comfort in the fact that those had been the only points she lost. 

He’d compare her directly to Meggie, too. “Miss Summers can behave herself, surely the rest of you can too,” he’d tell the rowdy class primly. Meggie would be sitting with her hands folded in front of her, not acknowledging the praise or any of them, just eyes forward, back straight, hair cascading like a curly waterfall down her back. She already knew she was better than them. She didn’t need the old man to tell her so.

So they bitched about it when they all got together to get drunk and complain. It turned out the class was worthwhile, if only because it had a few people worth knowing in it. Carter, for all his contrariness, is a fun drunk, and the girl he always sits beside, Eliana, has a tongue sharper than razors. A good-natured black boy named Don and a gay artist type called Casey fill out the complement perfectly, so the five of them meld as a unit until one can’t tell any longer that it was nothing more than a class that brought them together. 

Ash rules them, of course. Drama queen Casey says it’s because she’s hottest, while he pretends to swoon, and practical Don thinks, more realistically, it’s due to her confidence. Whatever it is, she has them under a spell, and they know it, and she knows it, and they discuss it good-naturedly over fries at the McDonald’s closest to campus. “It’s not that you rule us,” Carter argues, of course, popping a fry into his mouth, and then talking through the mouthful of masticated potato. “It’s just that we’re all, okay, a little fascinated by you.” 

It’s true, and Ash takes pride in how fascinating she is. She’s arrogant, she’ll admit that – and if she doesn’t, she has Eliana to tell her. For all Eliana’s realness, she, too, is under the same spell, although she’s straight. Hell, Casey is gay, and he still can’t keep his eyes off Ash. But he says he’s bi, after all, although he only ever goes for the most macho of jocks, and Eliana has given zero indication she’s ever been interested in women. Yet here she is, a reluctant admiration in her eyes whenever Ash is holding court, lording over all of them with the loudest voice and the best stories. In fact, it’s Ellie that comes up with the idea in the first place.

Halfway through the first semester, Ash cuts her hair. Like, all of her hair. She fails an English essay, and sure she didn’t try that hard, but she’s pissed off about it anyway. When Ash gets pissed, she gets impulsive, and at first she wants a tattoo, but then she sees the scissors on her roommate’s desk. The feeling of scissors snapping through hair is exhilarating, as is watching herself change before her eyes in the warped mirror above the desk. 

Even so, Ash has to admit the end result isn’t anything she’s proud of. She waltzes into a hair salon and ignores the way the stylist’s eyes widen at her sloppily shorn locks. The hairdresser plays with it for a while, trying to get lengths even, and eventually tells Ash that a buzz-cut might be her best option. She says it like she’s afraid Ash will burst into tears, but Ash likes the idea of that even more dramatic change, so she tells the scissors-wielding woman to bring it on. 

The result is this – the closely shaved skull that makes Ash’s whole face dramatic. She’s not pretty anymore, she’s striking. Without the waves of her hair softening her face, she’s all angles and hard lines, cheekbones, ski-slope nose, the hard edge of a jawline. Ash watches herself transform in the mirror and she loves what she sees.

Her little clan can’t help but agree. Carter whistles when he sees her, and Casey pretends to swoon in the back of the McDonald’s booth where they have staked their little claim. “Damn,” Eliana says reluctantly, and Ash swells like a peacock under their collective appreciation, preening unabashedly at the praise. 

“It’s bold,” Don puts in, and Ash agrees, fingering the buzz cut that leaves her shoulders bare for the first time in her life. Her head is spiky with the little growth that’s left, and she likes rubbing it between her fingers, even when she catches the angle wrong and it feels like being pricked by pins. It’s daring, even for her, but she likes it. She thinks she’ll put in a purple streak later too, when the newness of this has worn off. Always needs a little extra edge to scandalize the adults, make sure she continues to stand out. Ash doesn’t care that she’s vain, but if she’s going to be beautiful, she wants people to notice, and she wants them to raise their eyebrows. 

She tunes back in because Casey is talking, and he always has some weird wonderful thing to say. “You have to baptize it,” he insists, and it’s just the kind of bizarre but almost genius shit that Ash had hoped for. “You have to…christen it, somehow.”

“Seduce someone,” Eliana suggests, grinning around her mouthful of fries, hand coming up to cover her shining teeth, and around the table a shout of assent goes up so loud that the cashier’s head snaps up to glare at them. Carter rolls his eyes and Casey halfheartedly flips the high-schooler off. They’re the only ones in the establishment, which can’t even be charitably called a restaurant. Who else sits down in a McDonald’s at nine pm on a Sunday?

Immediately intrigued by the game, Ash tilts her head, pretending to consider. “All right,” she agrees after a moment, a smile flashing over her lips. “Who do I go for?” She has a lineup in her head, a couple likelies picked out that she wouldn’t mind a few rounds with. There’s the blonde in stats, or that butch Chinese girl with the blunt cut bangs…“Maybe-”

“No,” Carter cuts in chidingly, and she rolls her eyes, still smiling, humoring his interruption. “We pick.”

She smiles even wider. This, she likes. They’ll come up with something good for her, to make this game a challenge. When she pulls it off, they’ll be even more firmly under her sway. Her loyal tribe, hanging on to all her little miracles. 

“Ashley!”

“Tiffany?”

“Kristal!”

“Why not Andre?” This is from Casey, who says it dreamily, disregarding completely who he’s talking to. 

“Ew,” Ash wrinkles her nose and shakes her head, rolling her eyes at the lust-struck look in Casey’s face. 

“Come on, Casey,” Carter rolls his eyes. “You know she’s a lesbian.” 

It’s hard to tell if the joke is that she could still easily land a guy, or that Carter doesn’t believe she’s actually only into girls. He calls her an opportunist, and it would be sort of homophobic if Ash didn’t see where he was coming from. From the outside, it probably does look like it doesn’t make a difference to her.

Ash decides to play it a different way. She smirks. “Sorry for your loss,” she shrugs, and blows him a kiss, and Carter rolls his eyes and looks away. Ash knows she’s got a little hold on him, straight boy extraordinaire, and that there was probably more than a little hope in that sarcastic, drawn out, “lesbian.” 

She also knows that she would never, if she lived a million years and never masturbated again, jump into bed with Carter Vahn, but hey, that’s neither here nor there. 

“I know who you should seduce.” They can tell from Eliana’s voice that she’s to be taken seriously. All of them lean forward, eyes glinting in the shitty fluorescent lights. The sense of anticipation is almost too much to bear – the whole scene feels cinematic. Ellie smiles triumphantly, pleased to have them enthralled. She stretches the moment, savors it, but relents before she loses her audience. “Meggie.”

Casey is the first to sink back into the booth, shaking his head in wonder. They all take a moment to process the pure genius of the plan, and then there are smiles all around. Carter is shaking his head at the deviousness of it, and Casey is practically rubbing his hands together in glee. Don is leaning back, arms folded, and Ash can just tell he doesn’t believe she can do it. He’s the one that has a bit of conscience, and so there’s some hesitation in his condoning it, but she can tell the real issue here is that he doesn’t believe that she can do it. Ash feels a giddy excitement bubbling up in her. The thrill of the chase.

“All right,” she agrees, her grin cocky as can be. “You’re on.” There are cheers all around, hardly muted by the shouted protests of the cashier, who’s glaring fit to kill at the only customers he has. Ash looks around at all the pleased faces and relishes the moment just a second longer before she gets down to business. She has to get this exactly right, make sure that what’s laid out before her is actually possible, what with Meggie being completely heterosexual and all. “What do we count as seducing, now?”

“Girl is straight as a rail,” Casey reads her mind and spits back her thoughts almost mournfully. He’s always gunning for the hottest people in the room to be gay, as if that brings up the average of the whole community. He all but threw a party when Ash came out to him. 

There are nods as others concede his point. Ellie is the one that finds a compromise. “You get a confusion kiss out of her, and I’ll say I’m sold.”

Even Carter can’t argue. He shakes his head, grinning. “I’ll say that’s fair. Twenty bucks if you can do it.”

For a moment, Ash considers how hard it might be. Sure, she’s hot, and she has full confidence in her seduction skills, but Meggie is straight, stuck-up, and seriously puritan. But she’s bored, and it’ll be a fun little project, and Ash has never been able to resist a dare.

“All right, we have a deal,” agreed Ash, sticking out a hand. She shakes with all of them, one by one, and their grins only widen, until they’re all smiling like maniacs, delighted with themselves. A perfect test, a perfect game, something to pass the time in physics and beyond. Something to test their infallible leader, a test that she could actually fail. Whatever happens, the next few weeks are sure to be a little more interesting.


End file.
